Big Screen is quick rest for stress
To perform Big Screen, you need to breathe at a different rate than normal. Usually inspiration and expiration take roughly equal amounts of time.
If you get too worried or upset, you won’t be able to even begin to tackle the task.
MATTHEW EDLUND M.D.
Contributing Columnist
health@lbknews.com
These are not easy times. People are feeling stressed. How do you calm down when your supervisor is ordering you to immediately do someone else’s work and if you don’t finish by 6 p.m., you will join her on the unemployment line? Or you’re preparing a family trip and find an unbelievable deal just as your 16-year-old marches in requesting the car to “work with a friend on a class project,” followed by your 12-year-old demanding help with her math homework? What do you do when your heart begins to race, your eyes blur?
You might try the “Big Screen” technique. Big Screen can be done many different ways, but the simplest involves: one, learning to breathe slowly, and two, visualizing a large television screen. To perform Big Screen, you need to breathe at a different rate than normal. Usually inspiration and expiration take roughly equal amounts of time. In Big Screen, expiration should last twice as long as inspiration. So you count. Breathe in while counting slowly to seven, and then breathe out counting to 15. If you can’t count slowly, follow the second hand on your watch breathing in for seven seconds, out for 15.
To do the job slightly better, breathe with your belly. At first you can put your hand on it, feeling your abdomen expand with inspiration, contract with expiration. Sense the air moving in and out, in and out. Now that you’ve the breathing down, and if social circumstances permit, put your hand over your eyes, continuing to breathe slowly.
As you breathe, visualize the room you’re in. See it, yourself, and all the people around you as appearing on a giant television screen. On that screen you see everything, what people are saying and not saying, and what you want to do.
If your supervisor has given you an impossible task, consider: maybe he’s worried about his own job. If you get too worried or upset, you won’t be able to even begin to tackle the task.
Think about the whole impossible job. What parts can be done quickly, what parts not? Concentrate on those sections that provide the best chance of making the job appear done by the end of the day. After you do your best, you’ll leave in the evening ready to talk to friends and family about what you might do next. Maybe there are better jobs out there. You’ll ask around.
If your children are shouting at you to get what they want, tell them you have an urgent task and will speak to both of them in five minutes.
Doing Big Screen, you quickly recognize several things: that the travel deal you’re working on may literally be too good to be true, and that you have to check the company out carefully before providing credit card numbers. You also realize that your son’s “class project” is a not very surprising excuse to visit his girlfriend, when he really should be studying for tomorrow’s tests, and that your daughter is more frightened than incapable of math. If you can get her to solve one or two problems by herself, she may be able to do the rest on her own.
How long does all this take? With practice, Big Screen can be accomplished within a minute, though to your mind it will feel far longer. You might even have time to check out bona fides on that travel company before the kids start pounding the door.
The usefulness of “Big Screen” is that you gain perspective, training your mind to think of solutions rather than problems. You also put your physiology back onto that part of the anxiety performance curve where maximal results should occur. Remember that if you get too anxious you can’t perform at all, so getting the stress level down even a bit can improve function a lot.
Sometimes the kids won’t give you five minutes. Sometimes your supervisor wants your neck and no amount of superior work will let you keep your job. Yet if you can learn to do Big Screen even half-well, you’ll find you have a new tool for dealing with sudden, imposing stress, a tool that can be further developed by other relaxation techniques, like self-hypnosis.
As you get better practicing Big Screen, you might start to think about the governmental political and economic moves that led to present catastrophes and the kinds of national policies that will fix them.
But first things first.
Dr. Matthew Edlund practices sleep medicine and psychiatry in Sarasota. His new book, “Designed To Last,” is available online. He can be reached at 365- 4308 and via his Web site at www.doctoredlund.com.
Click here for more Staying Alive columns by Dr. Matthew Edlund.
